The value of the global carbon market contracted for the first time last year, according to new figures from Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) that show market activity only reached €61bn in 2012, a decline of more than a third on the previous year.

In his final testimony submitted to the Iowa Utilities Board on the proposed coal-fired power plant in Iowa, NASA’s James Hansen used a very provocative metaphor about the trains that deliver coal:

If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains — no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species.